Capacity building project (CapEFA) on teachers in Senegal

UNESCO Dakar is coordinating a capacity-building project (CapEFA) on the establishment of a national teachers’ training system for basic education, including literacy and non formal education (AENF in French) in Senegal.The project was launched in October 2012 and is scheduled to run until the end of 2014.

The project aims to support the Minister of Education to implement a teachers’ training policy in basic education, both in the Regional Training Centre for Education Personnel and in universities.This involves two specific goals:

Reforming the training plan for pre-school and elementary teachers in order to introduce the needed skills for literacy and bilingual education; so the system may benefit from versatile teachers , and

Establishing a regulatory and legal framework, including a system of Accreditation of Prior and Experiential Learning for the current AENF facilitators.

Activities

UNESCO Dakar is currently working with the technical and administrative departments of the Minister of Education (reforms and plans direction, AENF direction, teachers’ training direction…), civil society organizations (teachers’ federations…), as well as technical and financial partners on:

dialogue and consultation for the decision making,

definition of a new national training policy for basic education,

taking into account the issue of languages,

documentation and production of knowledge and capitalisation of best practices,

establishment of a process of accreditation of prior and experiential learning (APEL) of facilitators from the non formal sector,

development of a master plan and integration mechanism of AENF into basic Education through management of teachers and their career perspectives.

This collaboration should have a positive impact on the whole Education system: the formal as well as the non formal sector.

About UNESCO’s CapEFA programme

The programme was launched in 2003 by UNESCO and seeks to support countries’ efforts to achieve the Education for All goals, in particular Goal 4 “achieving a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults”. This is an extra-budgetary funding programme financed by pooled funds from the Nordic States (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden) and Switzerland, provided to UNESCO which contributes with technical expertise through staff.

A restitution workshop on the results of a diagnostic study of Education personnel training systems, including AENF, took place on the 18th and 19th June at UNESCO Dakar. The workshop included discussions on the studies relating to

the current plan for initial and ongoing training in the CRFPE, the FASTEF, contracting universities and other teachers’ training structures;

the institutional and legal framework of the initial and ongoing training system for inspectors, formal teachers and AENF personnel, and

the teachers and inspectors training plan, including AENF; in order to establish a plan to realise the project.